Comics is an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that allows you to easily read your favorite comics wherever and whenever you want to. The app is clean, polished and easy to use. It’s definitely a winner.

You start off with an empty library of comics, so downloading is the first step. In order to download comics, you’ll need to create an account with ComiXology.com. The sign up process is fast, simple and will allow you to download comics in no time at all. The store includes three main sections: featured, free and top twenty-five. There is also a section to search for a specific title, rating, genre, creator or publisher. When in the featured section, you can view comics by new, popular or rating. Each listing includes a graphic and price tag. When you tap on a comic, you’ll get even more information about it, including a summary, recommended age rating and page count. You can also add your own rating, buy it in print and check out other comics people liked. You’ll probably want to start with the free section which includes over forty free comics to download. There are also paid comics available, most of which were a dollar. In-app purchasing works well, and is an easy way to rack up quite an iTunes bill.

The next thing you’ll notice is that your downloaded comics are very well organized. You can check out your previously viewed or just downloaded comics, or browse by title, creator, publisher or genre. Tilting your device in landscape view will display all your comics in cover flow, which is a very nice feature.

Reading the comic is incredibly intuitive and enjoyable. The screen is divided into thirds, so tapping the left or right sides of the screen will advance or go back one panel at a time. The middle of the screen brings up the settings, which allow the user to truly customize their comic viewing experience. Some of the options include animation transition times, letter boxing and automatic rotation. Rotation is one feature you may want to play with. Some panels are drawn in portrait and some in landscape. By default, automatic rotation is turned off, so you can hold your device in one position the whole time. However, if you are in portrait view and a landscape panel appears, it will be resized to the screen’s width. You can optionally turn your device whenever you have a landscape panel, or you can turn on automatic rotation and be forced to turn your device to correctly orient the picture. I prefer to keep my iPhone in landscape mode the entire time. You can also double tap on specific areas to zoom in if you’d like to look at more detail.

Comics is such a polished application, there is really very little wrong with it. I did experience a couple of crashes when tapping on some browsing options, but my comic reading experience was always nice and smooth. The only issue you may have with this app is the lack of big name publishers like DC and Marvel. So, even though you won’t see Spiderman or the Incredible Hulk, there are so many other quality comics included that you probably won’t miss them too much. With a free version available in the app store, I strongly recommend checking it out.